


Never Fade Away

by kasiapeia



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game), cyberpunk - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet, Bittersweet Ending, Corpo V (Cyberpunk 2077), Cyberpunk 2077 Spoilers, Declarations Of Love, Different interpretation of the ending, F/M, Not Beta Read, Sad Ending, Slight divergence but relatively compliant, This was my favourite ending despite it being objectively the saddest beyond maybe the Corpo ending, like every single other work of mine:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28258047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kasiapeia/pseuds/kasiapeia
Summary: They are standing on the precipice of what comes next. Everything they've done, everything they've accomplished, have just led them back to where they started.And Johnny's an idiot for thinking it could've ended any other way. It will always end like this, with her on the edge, ready to say goodbye, and with him, begging for just one more second. There will never be enough time, but he will have to content himself with the few seconds they still have.
Relationships: Johnny Silverhand & Female V, Johnny Silverhand & V, Johnny Silverhand/Female V, Johnny Silverhand/V
Comments: 13
Kudos: 154





	Never Fade Away

**Author's Note:**

> Massive spoilers inbound for the (one of) the endings of Cyberpunk 2077. Don't say I didn't warn you. I wrote this because I like pining after characters I can't romance, and I like tragic romances even more, don't @ me ;-;
> 
> Massive thanks to those who left comments on the last Johnny/V fic, you prompted this one. I have other more happy stuff with my usual dose of pining in the works. Comment below if you're interested or even if you just liked this fic!

_{I saw in you what life was missing,  
_ _you lit a flame that consumed my hate._  
 _I'm not one for reminiscing but  
_ _I'd trade it all for your sweet embrace.}_

Sometimes, Johnny thinks V forgets just how much time he’s spent wandering the endless corridors of her mind. At this point, he almost knows her better than he knows himself. As the Relic had corrupted her mind, the barriers between them had degraded.

When he’d first found himself in her head, he used to only catch snippets of her memories when she’d been asleep, her control over the body loosening just enough for him to slip between the cracks. Nowadays, he hardly knows where she ends, and he begins. She is as much of a part of him now as his blood, his bones.

In hindsight, then, he wonders how he hadn’t seen this coming, but hey, hindsight’s fucking twenty-twenty.

She looks up at him with a soft, sad smile upon her lips, Cyberspace blurring the edges of her form in grainy pixels. She doesn’t even have to say a word for him to know what’s coming next—that fucking smile has been his bane for _how_ many weeks? He’s seen it a hundred times before. It’s her fucking “I’ve got bad news and I’m here to break it to you” smile, the one she pulls out on a grieving mother to tell them their son didn’t make it home.

But now, she’s turning it on him.

“Johnny…”

“Don’t—” He’s supposed to be a badass, isn’t he? Johnny fucking Silverhand—the anti-corpo terrorist, the rocker boy with a heart poisoned by cigarettes and booze. Playboy jackass who never learned when to step down from a fight. But fuck him, that voice of hers? That soft, gentle fucking _bullshit_ instead of her usual pointed insults followed by delighted laughter when he mopes? No, fuck this, he can’t do this. He can’t do this stupid fucking sappy bullshit for the life of him. Give him a fist fight, hell, give him a _gun_ fight. He’d take either of those options over facing down this five-foot-nothing ex-corpo cunt he used to hate with every fibre of his being.

But he doesn’t hate her anymore.

“Don’t say it, V.” His voice, once used to sing and scream all night at the top of his lungs like he didn’t have a care in the world, comes out in a whisper. He’d never been much scared of anything life had to throw his way, but she… She scares him in ways he hadn’t thought possible, and not in the way that she scares so many others. Others, she scares with her anger and fury and the way she can cut through entire crowds of people with her sword like they’re made of paper. She scares him with softness, with kindness she reserves for no one else. “Please.”

A pained, bitter laugh escapes her, tears pricking at her warm brown eyes. “You always could see straight through my bullshit, couldn’t you?”

“V…” He wishes, suddenly, that they’d just had a moment longer in the real, where she was warm and solid beneath her touch. Here, she’s cold; the numbers that have replicated her psyche are unable to compensate for how she’d felt in his arms. In another world, would they have woken up, together? In their own bodies?

In another world, might he have been able to call her his own?

She leans into the digitized touch of his hand cupping her cheek, eyes closing as she lets out a shuddering breath.

“You promised me,” he says, like any promises matter anymore. “You promised me that you’d go back, that if we got you here—”

She silences him, savouring the last few moments they have together before… Before what? Before she’s lost to him forever? “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I-I can’t. I can’t go back only to die when you have a chance to live. The math—it doesn’t add up.”

 _Fuck your math,_ he wants to say, as if that’ll mean anything to her ex-corpo mind. She’s done all the math, done all the calculations, and to her, this is the best possible outcome. Six months for her, a lifetime for him—how had he ever expected her to put the latter as anything but her first choice?

“Look at me.” Anger flares hot and bright within his chest. The _audacity_ she has—he wants to hate her for it. How dare she throw all of this away out of— Out of— “I’m already dead, V. You’re not, and you’re gonna just roll over instead of fightin’ for what’s yours?”

“It’s not _my_ life anymore,” she says, clutching his hand tight like she’s afraid he’ll let go, like he even _could_ let go. They’re counting down the seconds, and he will tear the world apart just to keep her close for as long as he can. “I go back, and I’m dead. You’re already dead, but you—Johnny, I _saw_ you. Hellman said I’d become more like you, but he also said you’d become more like me, and I _watched_ you find a reason to live again.”

“That reason was _you_. I can’t do this without you, can’t fucking wake up every morning to see _your_ face in the mirror knowing you could’ve been standing there instead.” When is the last time he’d cried? Years ago? Over Alt? Must have been, but his tears are starting to choke him now, suffocating him beneath a wave of misery and grief. “Valerie—”

A laugh bursts forth as he says her name—a sin she’d kill anyone else for, but upon his lips, she can almost pretend to tolerate it. “You are the most patient and dedicated man I have ever met, Johnny,” she says. “You have spent your whole life dedicated to a thankless cause, and you did so alone. Swear to me that it’ll be different this time? I won’t have you fucking up _my_ liver with drugs and booze, you got that?”

“V—”

“No, listen.” She shakes her head, stray pieces of ink-black hair escaping her tight ponytail. “You’re getting a second chance. Don’t fuck it up. You… You take care of everyone, okay? You fucking promised me that you’d look out for them, I expect you to keep that or so help me, I will claw myself back into the real to beat your ass.” Despite everything, he laughs. “Mama Welles, Vik, Misty, Rogue, Kerry, Panam… You’re going to fucking hate yourself after this, I know you, but they’re losing someone too. Grieve if you must, but don’t grieve alone.” She wipes her tears on the cuffs of her shirt even as they dissolve into intangible pixels. “And live for me, okay? Do that for _me_. Make this life better than the last one. Get all those things on my bucket list crossed off for me.”

“Want me to make you proud, huh?”

This time, it’s V who reaches up to cup the side of his face, brushing her thumb over the swell of his cheek. “You’ve already made me proud, Johnny. Not too long ago, you were trying to kill me. Now look at you.” Her lip quivers as more tears roll down her cheeks, the cold-blooded merc barely able to keep her voice steady long enough to speak. “I love you so much.”

“I can’t go on without you.” He sounds hollow, empty, like she’s killed a part of him, and maybe she has. When she crosses that bridge, she’ll be taking a part of him that he will never get back, leaving a part of her in the hole she’d left.

It’s the closest he’s ever come to saying Those Fucking Words out loud—the ones he’s not spoken aloud since he was a kid, and it’ll probably be the closest she’ll ever get to hearing them. But she knows. He knows that she knows what the words mean, knows that this is the closest thing he can offer her. He’s on his knees before her, heart all but held within his hands for her to take, and she’s just smiling through her tears like nothing’s changed.

“Stay,” he begs, as if asking her one more time will change her mind. “ _Please_.”

But she just smiles and shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“I—” _Swallow your fucking pride, jackass._ “I’m scared for ya. For me. For everything.”

“I know,” she says, “It’s okay to be scared.”

“I’ll bring you back. I promise. I won’t stop until I do.”

There comes that sad smile again, the one that would have him on his knees if he weren’t there already. “I know you won’t,” she says. “And if by some fucking miracle, you find a way, I will come back to you. You and I, we’re part of a whole, you see, and the things we love have a way of coming back to us, in the end.” She gets to her feet, and helps him to his own. Her cheeks are still wet with tears, but she stands tall, confident. “Take care of them for me, Johnny.”

He wants to say those three accursed ones, the ones that hurt more than a fucking bullet to the chest. He’s never said them before, and he’ll never get a chance to. She’s already standing at the edge, peering down into the endless abyss, illuminated by a single pillar of bright white-green light. There’s an impossible wind sweeping her hair back, jostling the edges of her jacket. Neither of them know what lays beyond, neither of them what comes next.

It’s his last chance.

He scrambles towards her, desperate for just one fucking second more like he won’t always want just one more second. “V, I—”

She turns to glance at him over her shoulder, her cheeks shining with tears like her skin contains the light of a star. “I know,” she says simply, and falls forward into the unknown.


End file.
